The Bewilderness

Zimwatch: Africa's unity shrivels before misery

The Telegraph was rather poor in its choice of leader to quote from at the African Union: Omar Bongo of Gabon is unlikely to  criticise a fellow 'Big Man' for the mere formality of rigging.His rhetoric of heroism only draws attention to his own hollow leadership and allow one to muse whether he and his cronies should also be targeted by sanctions.

More surprising and damning is the leak to the Mail and Guardian, where a memorandum by Thabo Mbeki predicted the Zimbabwean crisis that he singularly failed to prevent.

His paper, leaked to the Mail and Guardian, a South African weekly, amounts to a point by point critique of Mr Mugabe's decisions. Mr Mbeki urged him to avoid confrontation with Britain, take concerted action to revive the economy and stop employing the rhetoric of the anti-colonial struggle.

"In conditions of growing impoverishment among the people, it becomes impossible to mobilise these masses on the basis of the anti-colonial struggle," he wrote.

Mr Mbeki said that Zanu-PF should "encourage free, open and critical discussion" and "ensure the freedom of the press".

He criticised Zanu-PF's recruitment of veterans of the war against white rule, saying they would only "use force against the people" and undermine the party's support.

Mr Mbeki urged Zanu-PF to "understand that the great strategic challenge that faces Zimbabwe today is economic recovery". He added: "To resort to anti-imperialist rhetoric will not solve the problems of Zimbabwe, but may compound them."

Without economic revival, Zimbabwe would endure a "general crisis that will destroy the independent national democratic state".

Thabo Mbeki's prediction of national failure places his inaction in stark contrast. Now that he has failed to provide any leadership in the South African Development Community and the African Union, Mbeki should step aside and allow other democratically elected leaders to condemn Mugabe. The ructions in the AU meeting at Sudan have re-enacted the understandable faultline between representative liberal democracy and authoritarianism.

This also presents a visible watershed for the West between the post-colonial generation that often blamed empire for the problems that they inherited or created. The transition from a colonial mindset to sovereign responsibility has now taken place across most of Africa with Mugabe acting as an ideological outlier for kleptocrats and reactionaries. It is insufficient to condemn the President of Zimbabwe as a throwback, since the rhetoric of victimhood and violence appeals to the disaffected and the armed thug, providing a justification to cow opponents and redistribute existing assets. In poor countries, Mugabe acts as the voice of the zero sum; though even the most supportive may now begin to see that his approach has resulted in a sum approaching zero.

With the ruination of Zimbabwe and the reviling of Mbeki, we may begin to see a democratisation of foreign policy in southern Africa, as actions are taken to cow and control regimes that immiserise their own people and threaten the security of their neighbours. Perhaps.

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The 50th state or the 1st colony

Did you know that the monarchy of the Sandwich Islands survives, despite the US backed coup of the 1890s? This is one of the shadowy nativist groups that demands sovereignty for the aboriginal islanders and denounces the annexation of the islands by the United States

Hawaii has about 200,000 Native Hawaiians, or kânaka maoli, out of a population of 1.3 million. The Hawaiian Kingdom Government is just one of a number of sovereignty groups, many with similar names, waging independence campaigns.

All aim to "right the wrong" inflicted on Native Hawaiians in 1893 when a small, mostly American group of sugar plantation owners and other businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy with the support of US troops sent ashore from a Navy warship.

The then monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, gave up her throne "to this superior force of the United States of America" and was imprisoned in the Iolani Palace in Honolulu, built by her brother King Kalakaua. In 1898, Hawaii was annexed by the United States and in 1959 became the 50th US state.

"The Hawaiian kingdom was unlawfully taken over by a coup d'etat and then those that took it over formed an illegal government and then ceded Hawaii to the United States," said Leon Siu, minister of foreign affairs for the Hawaiian Kingdom, another sovereignty group that shares many of the Hawaiian Kingdom Government's aims.

The chances of Hawai'an independence are too small, as nativists are outnumbered and outgunned by everybody else. Nor do they even have limited sovereignty like Amerindians in mainland states. The annexation was a dismal affair and restitution in some manner is appropriate. The apology given by Bill Clinton in 1993 strikes as insufficient. Yet, such measures need to be balanced with the property rights and demands from those who live in Hawai'i now: families and individuals who have no less a right to live in the slands that they call home.

I see robots

The Sydney Morning Herald is the latest paper to play Whoops Apocalypse with the Singularity. With a lurid title ("Android Apocalypse"!) and a cheesy painting of the Terminator, reporter Charles Purcell lines up Hugo De Garis as interview numero uno. Garis has written a book for his alarmist vision, The Artilect War, where he predicts the unknowable with aplomb. In visions of the future, there are optimists and pessimists but certainty is a rare and truly mistaken quality.

Yet in his book, The Artilect War, he imagines a scenario where there will be a terrible battle between the forces who want to build these massively intelligent machines (the Cosmists) and those who don't (the Terrans). The Terrans would either fear the potential for catastrophe - what if a robot soldier accidentally nukes a city? - or be nervous about the idea of humans being surpassed by machines.

De Garis says the growth of nanotechnology will give engineers and scientists powerful new tools. There will be an explosion of knowledge of how the brain works - companies involved in artificial brain research "will be the Googles and Microsofts of the future".

This technology can be used to create artificial brains that replicate many of our brain's pathways and features for use in the robotics industry.

Visions of war and gigadeath during the twenty first century, as speciation and genocide stalk the Earth, proves a useful talking point for any article. Yet De Garis's role in China is worth some investigation. He migrated to the communist state in 2006, and subsequently became the director of the China Brain project. The whiff of utopian politics is given off from his unpublished work: Multis and Monos: What the Multi-Cultured Can Teach the Mono-Cultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State

In his role as the dircetor of the China Brain project, De Garis is attempting to create an artificial brain using 15,000 neural network modules, evolved one at a time and structured on evolutionary engineering principles. This project is cheap and quite open, given the strictures that authoritarian states tend to place upon research. Yet China does not surprise in its scientific and technological opening, both aspects of the continued growth of this strange giant.

The willingness of the Chinese state to fund early research on artificial intelligence lends strategic and geopolitical significance to this blue sky project. Perhaps like their counterparts in DARPA, they see these projects as small investments in a future that lies beyond the doom of global warming and resource dieback.

I see robots. So does China. De Garis coined artilects. The term did not fly. the artilect war may not come. Too much Terminator as a child? To see more than ten years ahead is foolhardy at best.

Brown's lame-duck presidency

At the start of the second year of Brown's administration, the term 'lame duck' applies to a Prime Minister who has wasted the opportunity that his  succession afforded. This is an extraordinary position for a British Prime Minister to be in, given the lack of accountability in executive action and the unparalleled powers of patronage held by the party leader. Like all governments, 'lame duck' applies when the confidence of the country is lost and the hold over party is thus forfeited. Who knows when the transition ever reached a tipping point. The sense of relief and renewal that pervaded the Labour Party after Blair stepped down was replaced by a dawning realisation of defeat and a dishonourable scramble to revolt as a flailing desire to save their seats.

Yet, the key focus of the media and the the Parliamentary Labour Party revolves around leadership in the faux presidential style of the political system. The party battles are filtered through the lens of Brown, Cameron and Clegg to their satisfaction or detriment. We hear of duels and stalking horses, potential replacements and also-rans, as pundits sift out a favoured narrative. Even with a positive spin, Brown's character would not be able to replenish the elixir of confidence that has to be clear, before the voters will extend their trust. Therefore, despite all of the short term tactical measures designed to combat unpopular polls and the particular issues of each constituency MP, the rules of the game demand that the leader magnifies the popularity or the unpopularity of the party. Labour's MPs were so stupid in ditching the one leader acceptable to the electorate, whatever his flaws, that their defeat will be richly deserved.

It is within this framework that the choice of the party becomes clear. If they wish to retain a chance of a fourth term, they will need to consider replacing Brown with another candidate. Otherwise, the air of permanent emergency and crisis will continue to pervade. This is the atmosphere where new events act as plug-ins: a new by-election, a bad poll rating, coming fifth to the BNP in Henley, or losing your Scottish leader (a not uncommon occurrence for Labour, but one that was seen as distinctive in Blair's time). We have moved beyond the phase of "it can't get any worse" to a poisonous drip of bad news, that the MSM intravenously utilises to bring down the leader or the government.

The Westminster media have an artificial sense of their own importance as they conclude that their own writings contribute to the unpopularity of the government. The next two years of crisis will reinforce the self-belief of the lobby and their attempt to overthrow Brown in a putsch, alongside whatever MPs ally themselves with the reporters who write their stories. This complementary circle of virtue between resurgent media and the ticked off electorate will foster knives for Brown, and an early election or change of leadership will tip the lobby further into hubris. The conjunction of Labour's demise with the story they tell will result in a last hurrah, not the further consolidation of Westminster punditry and the MSM.

Unless a further black swan changes the rules of the game, we are set fair for two years of crisis. Those who disagree with such a diagnosis must reflect on the seachange that damned the Tories as toxic, a reversal of fortune that lasted all the way through Major's lame-duck administration to their defeat in 1997. It is a consideration that the natural party of government returns to power in thirteen years, whereas it took Labour eighteen. Defeat for Labour also has ideological speculations that I will indulge in elsewhere.    

Low trust government suborns our constitution

The role of the attorney general is a clear conflict of interest between the executive and the judiciary. This would clearly be worsened given the aggravated political interest of the party that dominates the executive. Yet, the Brown government, in a move that would not be sanctioned in a private company, ignores advice to separate the two roles, and under the guise of modernisation and transparency, attempts to tighten their grip upon this office. Say one thing, do the opposite! Not an unsurprising move on the part of the People's Party.

There is no problem in having the attorney general located within the executive. Conflict of interest can often act as a shibboleth for simplification that undermines the practical realisation of good government. And yes, I would support a greater diversity of corporate structures which encompassed conflicts of interest. Backscratching and the high trust economy may walk hand in hand; as compliance replaces realistic and practical settlements with rafts of rules that explain set games for thieves and honest men alike.

Whilst the Brown government uses the opportunity to increase its political influence, there is no difficulty with the principle. And structures separating supposed conflicts of interest will be suborned by the executive, if they wish to get their way. Low trust government suborns our constitution.

Zimwatch: the corroded corpse of a liberal polity

Morgan Tsvangarai has had to escape from Mugabe's thugs as the fall-out of  street violence and politicised thuggery prevent the run-off election promised by the regime. This is a strange counterfeit, as Mugabe always took pride in preserving the forms of a legitimate government, even as the kleptocracy corroded the mask of the rule of law. There are few historical parallels in this descent from illiberal democracy to anarchy.

The rumours that Mugabe has now become a figurehead, and that his influence has been supplanted by an unelected junta sounds the death-knell of this regime. Elements with ZANU-PF are unable to legitimate their role within Parliament or the professions, when polite fictions are destroyed by brute force and immiserisation. Despite the overwhelming force required to supplant opposition to the regime,  it is unclear if Zimbabwe is set to join Myanmar as a military junta.

The bravery of Morgan Tsvangarai and the Movement for Democratic Change has destroyed the fiction that Mugabe enjoys the support of the Zimbabwean people. Governments in the West are right to remove all notions of legimitacy from his regime, even if the United Nations and African catspaws place sovereigntist inertia above this unfolding disaster.

No-one can tell how this will play out. Thabo Mbeki's dithering and final request for a government of national unity reflects his failed diplomacy and does not expel the criminal gang that degrades the country. South Africa remains the key player in this tragedy and this gangster state may stay a while until a new President takes office. Only then may we see the intervention that Zimbabwe requires.

More rights, fewer freedoms

Abu Qatada's plight will annoy Muslims and Britons everywhere. His plight will annoy fundamentalist Muslims as they will view him as an innocent father, deprived of his family, and humiliated by a tyrannical, supposedly Islamophobe, country. His situation will annoy Britons because his links to Al Qaeda are well documented, his threat to the security of this country attested and his willingness to live off the state publicised. Bad enough that he wishes to blow some of us up, more galling that we pay for it. Two views that undermine the judciary, the human rights regime, NuLabs liberal-authoritarian convulsions, and potentially, David Davis.

The judge was sitting at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) in London, the same court which had previously described Qatada as “a truly dangerous individual” who was “heavily involved, indeed at the centre of terrorist activities associated with al-Qa’eda”.

But because Qatada has never been convicted of a criminal offence in the UK, and because he cannot be deported, the judge ruled that he had to be freed pending a last-ditch attempt by the Home Office to have the deportation ruling overturned in the House of Lords...

Police are expected to maintain a constant presence outside Qatada’s home to protect him from vigilante attacks, at an annual cost of tens of thousands of pounds.

The taxpayer will also fund at least £12,000 per year in benefits for Qatada, his wife and five children, even though Qatada was once found to have £170,000 in cash in his possession when he was stopped by police.

The government has not deported any individual living in this country who has been identified as a threat to national security. Part of this difficulty derives from the implementation of the Human Rights Act which the judiciary interprets as individual rights trumping collective security. This contributes to the perception of rights as a balance, a conflict, between freedom and security, leading to symbolic displays of ineffective authoritariansm and the erosion of liberty.

A return to the discourse of liberty is required: where freedom is the default position and individual rights are protected from state authority except where there is a threat and the individual can be deported to his country of origin. The current mess, a charter for lawyers fees and identity kit politics, has resulted in more human rights and fewer liberties, draconian laws and  snooping bureaucracy. Anti-terror laws that double up for snooping on bins. Only New Labour could strike a pose as Mr Atlas and kick sand in its own face.

Sarkozy's slow inaction farce

We do get occasional scare stories about European defence, often leaked by concerned parties, to prevent the development or stimulate outrage and head off the stupid idea at the pass. The latest wheeze,  indicative of the French presidency's concern with defence, is a European 'carrier group'. Since only Britain and France have aircraft carriers, this requires our cooperation for the branding.

As all exercises of this nature have proved desultory and symbolically return to barracks or dock after a few months, the latest idea will prove just as impermanent. We still await the Rapid Reaction Force, proposed in 1999, and rendered a slow inaction farce by bureaucracy.

The French president also renewed calls for a "modern, flexible" European force of 60,000 soldiers that could be deployed anywhere in the world for up to a year.

EU member states in 1999 committed themselves to achieving a Rapid Reaction Force of this size, deployable within 60 days. The goal was meant to be realised in 2003 but has suffered from flagging enthusiasm, lack of resources and duplication problems with NATO.

HFEA: saviour sons?

The passing of the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill highlights the complexities of dealing with scientific advances through legislation. The Bill was used to tidy up existing laws and repealed the Reprodutive Cloning Act, which prohibited reproductive cloning in 2001. Now, the new Bill allows Parliament to allow reproductive cloning on a vote without the need to introduce further primary legislation:

The Department of Health, however, has accepted that the legislation contains a flaw that could in theory make it easier for the ban to be lifted. Dawn Primarolo, the Health Minister, insisted in a debate during the Bill's committee stage that the Government has no intention of using this new power under any circumstances. She added that as new regulations would have to be approved by Parliament, there will still be democratic safeguards against cloning....

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “This power can only be used to permit the practice of curing an embryo or an egg of a serious mitochondrial disease. The Government will not use this power to permit the practice of reproductive cloning.”

It is unlikely that such a process will ever be passed, unless reproductive cloning is sanitised. The hysteria that surrounded its prohibition in 2001 seems distant now that we are dealing with some of the practical issues in embryology. Whether prohibition played its part, or whether the impracticality of using a technique with few practical uses , dampened the debate is unclear. The emotive language of 'flaw' and 'loophole' are readily used by the media, even though a safe technique for reproductive cloning could finally be made available for certain genetic illnesses. Thus, hysteria may finally be reduced to the status of a 'saviour son'.

Labour's jack straw castle

The Labour Party is facing financial retrenchment or bankruptcy; the members of the National Executive may be liable in the event of insolvency. For a party run by lawyers, Blairite modernisation did not extend to the organisation. Delicious irony aside, this leaves the party in power beholden to the trade unions, their main backers. A resurgent Tory party, financed privately through donations from the wealthy, has established an unequal playing field. To overturn this lack of social justice, Labour is angling to gain a financial advantage by drying up and tying up Tory donations, whilst allowing the unions a free hand.

Francis Maude, the Conservative spokesman for the Cabinet Office, said the Tories would insist that there be no deal unless reform of trade union funding was also on the table.

The party wants individual members to give their consent before their funds are given to Labour.

Mr Maude said: "Any reform of party funding must clean up politics and end the big donor culture, and we will support sensible reform proposals that create a sustainable long-term settlement.

"However, taxpayers should be very concerned that Gordon Brown wants state funding for the Labour Party to bail out his failing political party from bankruptcy."

Labour now has less than two years to achieve another electoral victory and overturn Tory dominance in the polls. This demands a long game, where their hold on the legislature is used to gain advantage: expect to see a left-wing lurch to appease the unions, laws on party funding to suck at the taxpayer's teat and, if none of these work, a final, desperate tinkering with the voting system. Or perhaps they will just use the Civil Contingencies Act, instead and prorogue any party that is insufficiently European.